Synopses & Reviews
Accounting has an ever-increasing significance in contemporary society. Indeed, some argue that its practices are fundamental to the development and functioning of modern capitalist societies. We can see accounting everywhere: in organizations where budgeting, investing, costing, and performance appraisal rely on accounting practices; in financial and other audits; in corporate scandals and financial reporting and regulation; in corporate governance, risk management, and accountability, and in the corresponding growth and influence of the accounting profession. Accounting, too, is an important part of the curriculum and research of business and management schools, the fastest growing sector in higher education.
This growth is largely a phenomenon of the last 50 years or so. Prior to that, accounting was seen mainly as a mundane, technical, bookkeeping exercise (and some still share that naive view). The growth in accounting has demanded a corresponding engagement by scholars to examine and highlight the important behavioural, organizational, institutional, and social dimensions of accounting. Pioneering work by accounting researchers and social scientists more generally has persuasively demonstrated to a wider social science, professional, management, and policy audience how many aspects of life are indeed constituted, to an important extent, through the calculative practices of accounting.
Anthony Hopwood, to whom this book is dedicated, was a leading figure in this endeavor, which has effectively defined accounting as a distinctive field of research in the social sciences. The book brings together the work of leading international accounting academics and social scientists, and demonstrates the scope, vitality, and insights of contemporary scholarship in and on accounting and auditing.
About the Author
Christopher S. Chapman is Professor of Management Accounting, Imperial College London.
David J. Cooper is CGA Professor of Accounting.
Peter Miller is Professor of Management Accounting, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Table of Contents
Preface
1. Linking Accounting, Organizations and Institutions, Christopher S. Chapman, David J. Cooper, and Peter B. Miller
2. Everyday Accounting Practices and Intentionality, Thomas Ahrens
3. Institutional Perspectives on the Internationalization of Accounting, Patricia J. Arnold
4. Studying Accounting in Action: The Challenge of Engaging with Management Accounting Practice, Jane Baxter and Wai Fong Chua
5. Management Accounting in a Digital and Global Economy: The Interface of Strategy, Technology, and Cost Information, Alnoor Bhimani and Michael Bromwich
6. Organizationally Oriented Management Accounting Research in the U.S.: A Case Study of the Diffusion of a Research Innovation, Jacob G. Birnberg and Michael D. Shields
7. On the Relationship between Accounting and Social Space, Salvador Carmona and Mahmoud Ezzamel
8. What is the Object of Management? How Management Technologies Help to Create Manageable Objects, Barbara Czarniawska and Jan Mouritsen
9. Governance and its Transnational Dynamics: Towards a Re-ordering of our World?, Marie-Laure Djelic and Kerstin Sahlin
10. Governing Audit Globally - IFAC, the New International Financial Architecture and the Auditing Profession, Christopher Humphrey and Anne Loft
11. The Study of Controller Agency, Sten Jonsson
12. Sketch of Derivations in Wall Street and Atlantic Africa, Vincent-Antonin Lepinay and Michel Callon
13. Behavioral Studies of the Effects of Regulation on Earnings Management and Accounting Choice, Robert Libby and Nicholas Seybert
14. Accounts of Science, Theodore M. Porter
15. Financial Accounting Without a State, Michael Power
16. Socio-political Studies of Financial Reporting and Standard Setting, Keith Robson and Joni Young
17. On the Eclipse of Professionalism in Accounting: An Essay, Sajay Samuel, Mark A. Covaleski, and Mark W. Dirsmith
18. All Offshore: The Sprat, the Mackerel, Accounting Firms, and the State in Globalization, Prem Sikka and Hugh Willmott